The Resilient Mind - If You Do What Is Easy, Your Life Will Be Hard (Explicit) - David Goggins

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

An accomplished endurance athlete, Goggins has completed over 60 ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. He once held the Guinness World Record for pull-ups completing 4,030 in 17 hours, and he’s a sought after public speaker.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to, if you do what is easy, your life will be hard with David Gagins. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. It's funny, man. People want to know how I'm always motivated. It's the unseen work. Like, I'm out running at 2 o'clock in the morning, 1 o'clock in the morning, in the gym, long sessions by myself.

That's real. How I'm able to just extract dopamine, the good dopamine whenever I want? Man, I've trained 99% of my life alone. No one pat me on the back. I did all of the work alone. And while I'm still hard on myself, I know what I did. So whenever times get bad, people, all this, who's your care of the boats and love? That's real.

I hate that people know me for that guy. because that guy is not every fucking day. Like when they see me, they want that energy. That's not me every day. I can extract it immediately when I need to because when you train alone and I lived alone for so many years in this misery and you're able to get out by yourself,

I can take myself to such a level of real, real passion and purpose. And like, the feeling I get is something I can't even explain by myself. I don't need anyone. That's why people come to me to motivate them. No one can motivate me. I have a resume full of fucking motivation.

That whenever I'm down, like, oh, hang on, motherfucker. Oh, you know, you know the truth. You know the truth. You know the darkness of the fucking dungeons and the fucking demons that fly. And then from there, it's like, okay, you were there. You know this. There was no one there to pick up the rucksack,

to pick up the boat, to pick up the log, to go in that. It was you. For two of my life, I wanted to be accepted. Growing up, I lied, I fucking did what I could. If you fucking like UFC and I didn't, I love it. I love it, man. Let's go fucking watch it, man. Be my friend, be my buddy.

That fucking weak-ass shit. I found it out through this path of life. Who is David Gagons? Who am I? So going through all... I did it alone. There was no fucking trophy on the fucking wall and the mantle. That trophy's in my fucking brain.

No one helped me get to. No one paid my fucking bills. No one did shit for me. No one ran those fucking miles, lost that fucking weight. I suffered on my own and developed this man who said, it's who I am, man. A very competitive, ultra-competitive dude that take it what you want, man. I call that personal sovereignty. Exactly.

There's not a lot of people that have that. That's me. There's a lot of people that change who they are depending upon what people want from them. And that's me. Yeah. That's important, man. And most people struggle their whole life to find out who they are. struggle their whole life to find out what defines them, what they actually enjoy and what they

don't. You start putting yourself in situations that suck. You'll find yourself. Yeah. You'll find it real quick. If you wherever the hell you're going through, it takes a lot of patience, a lot of time, and a lot of pitfalls, a lot of plateaus. You can hit so many fucking plateaus.

If you don't know how to get around that plateau, it's not going to happen fast. Yeah. Everybody wants the hack. Yeah, everybody wants to hack. There is no hack, man. they have the woes me mentality. It's too hard. Life isn't fair.

These things in life are not easy for me. You look to your left and you look to your right and you start to judge yourself off other people. Like if you're a female, well, she's skinny and she doesn't work out as hard as I do. And everything starts to corrupt your mind. You start to look around too much at other people and what they're doing and that starts to corrupt your own dialogue.

We are judging ourselves. against too many fucking people. You have to judge yourself against yourself. And that's the one thing I started learning, man. This isn't a race against me and Rich Roll. This race against David Gagons and David Gagons alone. And once you can silence all that bullshit, all the outside interference and things that are attracting your mind to everything,

you can then start to grow and realizing, I'm stressed out for no reason. This is my own little race. This is my own timeline. And this is how I'm going to run it. I think that so many people are so disconnected from themselves. They're operating on autopilot. They're reacting to their environment that even when given the opportunity to set a goal for themselves,

they generally don't set the right goal because they don't know what the fuck they're doing, because they don't even know who they are fundamentally. That's the big thing, man. And that's why it was important for me to finally realize stop being all these fake people I used to be. stop being afraid, there was no growth until I cut myself down to nothing, to the person I really was, the real human being. And once I found out who I really was, that's when I started growing. But where do you go to? You wake up on a morning, it's cold, it's wet, it's dark, you've got no cartilage in your knee, you've got shitty shorts, whatever it is that's the issue today.

It's warm on the couch. Your Mrs. says stay in bed. It's comfy, it's cozy. You've got work later on. You had an argument last night. You're slightly hung over. I know every motherfucker ain't going to do what I'm going to do. So this is how you level up. That's how you level up. I know there's a whole bunch of people with that right there.

That fires me up. That makes me fucking happy what you just said. That brings joy to my life right there. Why? Because I know there's so many people that have the ability and just refuse to get off that couch. refuse to study a few more hours, refuse to go deeper, to go further.

And that's where I gained the advantage. It's so easy to be great nowadays, my friend, because most people are weak. Most people don't want to go to that extra mile. Most people don't want to find that extra because it sucks. It's miserable. It's lonely. You talk about that you were kind of lonely by yourself.

I was the same way. And that used to hurt me growing up. Now I fucking thrive in that shit. That's the only place to be. There wasn't no pat on the fucking back at 300 at 275, at 250, at 220. No, that was you. So those things that come out of me that extract from me in the darkness, people are looking for that pat on the back.

Where is it? Oh, I don't need it. Because what I've done is in the fucking unseen work, I've built Frankenstein. So whenever shit gets nasty, David Gagnes goes, you had nobody anyway, motherfucker. So see how I'm talking to myself for now? That's me. That shit fires me to fuck up.

That shit makes me fucking nuts. You had nobody anyway, motherfucker. Look around you. There was no fucking team. It was you. There was no weight loss program or mom and dad waking you up saying you can do it. You can be better trying to build belief. You built belief when you had nothing.

Nothing. Rock bottom. You did that. So as times get hard for me, the truth comes out. And my truth is powerful as fuck. It's real. It's tangible. I feel it. It comes out of my brain as I speak about it. I'm reliving every single dark moment of my life to be here. So that is what people don't get. That is what motivates David Gagans, is the unseen work. Everybody needs that pat on the back. They need that training partner. They need that accountability coach. I don't hear that shit. And neither do they. But it's what we've trained ourselves to believe that we need.

The truth in front of you is it sucks. It's painful. It's fucking mind-numbing. And that is the truth. And that's why a lot of people don't like listening to me. because this is what it takes. Creating another voice and sometimes going out of it alone.

All the time going out of alone because no one's going to believe in you. Where I come from, a lot of you guys come from dark places just as dark as mine, maybe even darker. There's going to be times in your life when you don't want to wake up, you don't want to go to work.

Does it be times in life when you don't think you're good enough? With your family, your wife, your girlfriend, your husband, your significant other is going to doubt you. A lot of times you, you doubt yourself. In life,

nothing is promised to us. And so we take that mentality and we use it as, woe as me. I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good looking enough. I didn't get that lucky break.

That's the one thing I hate about people in life, man. They're looking for this great lucky break. The lucky break that you have right now is that you woke the fuck up. Here's your lucky break. There's something that came up with a lot. long time ago because I would always get tired. I'd always be down, but I always had to keep on going. When times get hard and you're looking around and no one's there to pat you on your back

and ain't no more motherfuckers to carry them damn boats. It's just you dragging it, just dragging the boat by yourself. And all you want to do is stop, but you can't. So all you out here just know one thing. Don't stop when you're fucking tired. Stop when you're done. You want to be as hard as you can be.

You don't want to be as hard as me, man. Sometimes be as hard as me is not a great thing. You want to make sure you can be as you can be. So, you know, that's all like a relative scale.

So, but I will tell you this, if you think you can and you're not, you are failing yourself. So that's kind of like the scale. The scale is a moving target for everybody. But people go, man, why are you going so hard every day, David? Because I know I can.

So if you know you can do more and you're not, that's the scale. So always think that in the back of your head. Like if you run 13 miles and you get home and you feel good, that's a good thing. but always know like you know i felt good i i can go further next time always keep that that skill in your mind so you i know you love pain you're like pain pain pain pain so what if like i have a back injury right now and it's like i know i could do more but it hurts so i'm like okay no it hurts i need to stop whereas you'd be like my feet are bleeding my elbows are falling off i'm gonna go I want to be that.

See, people get me wrong with that pain. Yeah. I don't love pain. So this is a good conversation. I don't love pain. It's just sometimes some of the things I do, pain is a part of the process. And you have to know how to manage pain,

but also know when pain is becoming something that you can't manage, you need to stop. But for me, I've been managing pain my entire life. So once again, my pain tolerance and me knowing how far I can push myself is very, it's way out there. I know it's body. I know what the mind. I know what it can take. But once again, that's a very moving scale for a lot of people.

So, yeah, so definitely make sure that you understand that it's not that I love pain. that I know that sometimes I push myself to a point where pain is just going to happen. And then within that pain, I know how to manage pain very well. It's so easy to be great nowadays because so many people are focused on efficiency, getting the most for themselves with the least amount of time and effort. Let all of them leave the gym early.

Skip school, take sick days, commit to becoming the motherfucker with a never-ending task list, This is where you make up the difference in potential. By learning to maximize what you do have, you will not only level the playing field, but also surpass those born with more natural ability and advantages than you. Let your hours become days, then weeks, then years of effort. Allow discipline to seep into yourselves until work becomes a reflex as automatic as breathing.

Some of you just don't understand. Some of you've been average for so damn long. You don't know what it is to do hard work. But there's a lot of you out there who want to be much more than average. But just don't know how to do it every single day to grind. You can find someone to oil those fucking gears up. So check it out. This is a mindset.

Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. But there's a motherfucker out there. Who wants what you have? Who wants the position you are? Who wants to just. who wants the wife that you have or the husband. There's someone out that you're hungry.

It wants everything you fucking have. Maybe it's true. Maybe it's not. But if it is, it's going to be your ass. So make that a motivation for you. Stay hard. If you're going to be successful in life, you've got to understand that there's a sense of urgency

that there are only 86,400 seconds in a day. And you got another. only operate in them, you've got to do it quick, you got to do it fast, you got to do it in a hurry. Wow, because there's somebody else who's on the same track you on, somebody else, they're on the same path that you're on, and somebody else just like you're trying to do it, and sometimes they're working just as much sweat, just as much tears, just as much blood, but you just got to do it what? You got to do it faster than they do it.

You've got to do it quicker than they do. Are you listening to what I'm saying? Pick up the pace. You're walking too slow. Pick up the pace. You're moving too slow. Pick up the pace. If you want to finish, sometimes you can't just finish.

You got to finish fast. You don't have as much time as you think you do. You master the present. That's why I wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning because if you get up at 6, you might be smarter than me. You hear me? You might. You might have more privilege than me.

You might. You might have more resources than me. You might. But I'm going to get up earlier than you. And I'm going to do it quicker than you do it. I'm going to do it fast than you do it. So by the time you get up with all your privilege, by the time you get up with all your stuff, I've already finished the race.

What the fuck you're waiting on? We sleep one-third of our fucking lives, and we think we can take fucking days off. We think we have the right to sit back and give ourselves a fucking option on which way we're going to go in life. Am I going to run today? Am I going to work out today?

Well, it's my birthday. You think time gives a fuck that's your birthday? You give me so too many fucking options. Let me tell you one thing. Time is running out. and keep on sitting around wondering what the fuck you want to do

you're just going to run out of time so make sure you do one thing stop following the fucking crowd they may take time off but you can't afford to life was always giving you a test trying to give you a way out trying to give you an excuse not to show up

you've got to have the mentality to show up every fucking day of your life so now what life goes at you It's our responsibility To show up to the Coliseum of Life Prepared for fucking battle I don't care what you're going through

What life's throwing at you It's your responsibility Finds your new 100% Take it upon yourself To do that Stay hard Where you're trying to go You might have to give up some friends

You might have to give up some opportunities You might have to give up some stuff To go from good to great Everybody talk that talk Everybody talk about going to the next level. Everybody's talking it. And too, it's time to pay up. And when it's time to pay, there are people who are not willing to pay.

You're going to have to sacrifice some sleep to get this one. You can't get up at the same time. You're going to have to sacrifice some friendship to get to this one. You're going to have to sacrifice some entertainment to get to this one. And the only way you prove to yourself that you really want is that you no longer hit the smooth button. You no longer lose focus when you're studying. You no longer take shortcuts. You're no longer playing games.

You are willing to do whatever it takes. I'll do whatever it takes to get to that milestone. If you want it, you will find time in your life to do it. If you don't want it, you will continue to do exactly doing it now. Give me excuses. You're going to make every excuse on why you can't do it. And that's why I can't connect it to you. That's why you hear the passion come out of me.

and you want to say it's anger? No, because I know it can be done. And you're telling me on why it can't be done. And then what you do is he's crazy, he's in a canic, no, you don't want it bad enough. If you want it bad enough, you will figure out how to make this shit happen. People don't want to go in deep, man. All the answer are inside of you. It's a very primitive way.

It's very barbarian. It's how we all think. It's how a man once walked the earth. And then we get all soft. The most powerful thing we have is our fucking brain, is our mind. And we don't use it anymore. What separates me from a lot of people is they go into a daunting task,

and the task is overwhelming. You have to be open-minded to the possibilities that I can do this. Once you shut your mind down to the possibility that it can be achieved, there's no way it can happen. I know that if you're in a fight, you have to attack. You have to keep attacking. the enemy has to know he is not going to give up.

You must break the soul of whatever the fuck is in front of you. That's what I realized. I was never breaking the soul of anything in front of me. If you keep on attacking something, nothing wants to stand in front of anything that is relentless.

Nothing. Life is the most brutal endurance sport of all time, and that's what we have to love about it. And love the fact that life continues to attack us. There are no timeouts. You can't just go

like in a sporting event when the coach doesn't like something and call time out. You have to be that person always prepared. Look inside yourself. Stop looking at me or other people out here

to be the hero of your story. This is time for you right now to get to know who you are as a person. Be alone with yourself. Knowing one thing in life, we are all very fragile in this world. We have to know that when we die,

We die with some meaning and some purpose in this world. When you become a savage is in isolation. When you train it for a big MMA fight or just a boxing match, you don't stay outside of isolation. You go in isolation. And that's when your mind changes. That's when your focus changes. Your dedication changes.

Don't use this time to fuck up your mind. Use it to grain strength, gain focus. Isolation is the key To strengthen your mind Come on a fathlet Let me teach you the real life How it really is The reason why you're a loser

And the reason why you're not fucking making it And the reason why you're trying to go to all these I go to all these fucking conventions Speak all the fucking time I look in the fucking audience And these people sign up Sign up, sign up Fucking every year

Go to a convention Thinking they're going to learn something fucking different No, you're lazy You know exactly what to do exactly what to do. It just sucks doing it. It sucks to do it.

Everybody has the ability to do it, but they just don't want to. They're going to keep asking questions and keep going to seminars. You can watch me, you can watch you, you can watch fucking Rogan and Cameron Haynes, all these motherfuckers. You can go to Tony Robbins and fucking bullshit.

All this shit. You do all this shit. If you, you could keep going back and keep spending money and spending money and spending money with no results. you can wonder, wow, maybe let me go try out David Goggins. He ain't going to fucking help you. You have to explore, examine the insides of yourself.

And what do you really want under life? Maybe you're a piece of shit. Maybe you want to be nobody. Maybe you're happy exactly where you are in life because obviously you are. Maybe you don't have the determination to be somebody better than who you are. And if you want to live with that, I'll support you in that. That makes you feel good.

Nothing I can say to you. Something in you has to wake up. And usually the only person that can wake it up is you. But if you don't have a little flame, you know, just that, just barely you're done. I can't light it for you. I want you to learn that the only way you grow is how to look at yourself

and say, okay, like I did. Table longer than this. What the fuck I have to do to get somewhere? I'm this. I'm this. I'm this. I'm this. I'm this. Well, basically, I'm not this. I'm not this. I'm not this. I can't do this. I can't do this. I'm all these insecurities. Your life finally started. When you sit in an ugly mirror and say, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, and this.

You finally started your life. But most of all, your biggest fears. The biggest things that put you in the fuck the place you are today are in there. So we all like to keep them shut. You like to lock them up. Act like they never happen. That's why you never grow. You never improve.

You never have real conversations like we're having right now. Never. Never. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's not, no, no, no, let's not go there. You got to relive it. Every fucking detail of it. You can't be like, oh, yeah, my dad beat me.

And they, you know, you know, it is what it is. Hey, it is what it is, motherfucker. It's killing you. It's taking over your whole fucking life. But that's the conversation. Yeah, my dad, I'm fine now, though. I'm good. Okay.

All right. No, you ain't. You ain't fine. Human beings want to show you the best side, and they want to hide the worst side. For me, I'm going to teach you how to be vulnerable. Because that's the only way you fix yourself. I didn't teach myself victory first.

I taught myself failure. And people go, that's so depressing. Is it? When you're 300 pounds and you can't read and write and you're fucked up, you don't many times you're going to fucking fail on that process? So if you don't know how to fail, there is no victory. I mean, you have buried yourself in such a deep fucking hole. You better teach stuff how to fail first.

Because if you sit in failure for too long, you will never come out of it. So I taught myself how to fail properly. I don't want to teach you how to fucking fail. and then eventually I started getting a few victories if you put yourself in the fire and you come out every fucking day like this and brush it off not scared to go back in there again

come on man your truth is real because human beings need to hear this then he stop hearing these hacks there's no fucking hack bro do it and do it and do it and do it and do it that's the hack the hack is going to fucking suck

And that's what I realized. It sucks to wake up every morning of your life. And do it again. Do it again. Do it again. It's not just there. It's not just there permanently for me. I woke up like every human being does and goes,

fuck man, I'm a fucking piece of shit today. How the hell is this going to work out for me? And you fight that. And you fight that. You don't override it. There's no override button. It's the conversation in your fucking in your head. So how do you do that?

We don't have enough of these conversations about the real conversation that every human being is having. And they have no idea how to get out of it. But they do. It's you against you. You against you. And if you misunderstand that, you have a real problem. If you misunderstand what I'm saying right now today, the problem is you. And you don't want to fix it.

Why most people don't want to do that is because of this scary. It unlocks a whole bunch of things about who you are and who you're not. It's scary. To wake up every day and say, I'm stupid, but I want to figure out a way to be smarter. Versus saying, man, I just can't do that. So you limit this box. So your box becomes so small of things you can do. My box wasn't even a box.

It was a fucking little like little pinhole. And then through examining myself, getting some willpower, some courage, it became bigger than this tape. There's no fucking passion. There's no fucking motivation. There's no, oh my God, man, I fucking, this is, no. It's every day of your life just doing. I just fucking did.

I just did. This is why I cussed. This is what is in me. This is what it took for me to be me. Sorry. It didn't take, hey, okay, we're going to do this today. No, this fucking really sucks. This is real, dude.

This is real. Just do your living. How do you want to live? How do you want to die? How do you want to fucking be remembered? That's it. That's it. Period.

For you to constantly win, win, when, when this voice over here, the real you is saying, get the fuck out of here. Go. You're nobody. You've always been nobody.

People don't hear that. That's a true voice. Whenever I take these tests, they're real hard. In the back of my brain, it's like, a good chance you're not going to make it, Gagans. This ain't you, bro. This ain't you. You weren't born like this.

This ain't you. The real you, bro. Study all you want to. But the second that fucking computer comes on with 150 questions, this ain't you, man. And somehow, comes back, I passed. Passed again. Passed again.

But that ruled me, back here every fucking time, it's saying, that ain't you, grow. That ain't you. And I have to outwork that voice. And then you had to create another voice over here that is saying you're better than that other voice. What happens is you have all these voices that are telling you you're fucked up and this can be hard. But for some reason, you put so much practice into you that you can ignore every one of them that are telling you you're not going to fucking make it and still be able to fucking make it.

But when you put that practice in, every day you lace them up, and I mean, Ron, it's just a metaphor for life. When you lace the motherfuckers up every day, pretty soon you win. Pretty soon you'll fucking win. If you have the courage and the heart

and the dedication and the mind, and everybody can go fuck themselves, I know what I know. I've listened to myself, enough to know, I know what I know. None of you can hear what I'm hearing. And that's what people don't do enough of. They don't listen to their journey.

They listen to everybody else shit, but everybody needs that pound the back. They need that training partner. They need that accountability coach. I don't hear that shit. And neither do they. But it's what we've trained ourselves to believe that we need. I've trained 99% of my life alone.

No one had me on the back. I did all of the work alone. I have a resume full of fucking motivation. That whenever I'm down, like, oh, hang on, motherfucker. Oh, you know, you know the truth. You know the darkness of the fucking dungeons and the fucking demons that fly. And then from there, it's like, okay, you were there.

You know this. There was no one there to pick up the rucksack, to pick up the boat, to pick up the log, to go in that. It was you. It was you. There was no pat on the fucking back at 300 at 275 at 250 at 220. No, that was you. You had nobody anyway, motherfucker.

Look around you. There was no fucking team. It was you. There was no weight loss program or mom and dad waking you up saying you can do it. You can be better trying to build belief. You built belief when you had nothing. Rock bottom. That's worth every dime ever made in my life.

is the fact that I can look at man in the eye finally and have a real conversation without going like this because I'm lying or I'm a piece of shit. Who I am and who I say I am, I am. No more lies. No more skirt in the truth. No more bullshit. And that is worth every dime ever made in my life.

And I swear to God on that. Most people are missing something because they don't know who they are. They never examine themselves. They've never done this experiment on themselves. Most people are missing something because there's so much trapped in there. There's so much in you that God or wherever the hell you believe in, or if you're an atheist, in you,

that you have not unlocked for you to be a piece of shit and come out of that. You don't just come out of it. You spent decades studying your mind in the human mind. You studied all because you have to put all this together. to create the mind to become successful. But once you figure out your, your brain, you become unstoppable to almost anything.

Your brain is amazing. Once you feed it the right conversation, the right mental nutrients, the right mental supplements, the right internal dialogue, at the right time, with the right hit, with the right proof of what you've done in the past

and you send it right to the right circuit, dude, you're a fucking beast. A beast. But once again, you just can't read about it. You can't sit back and be a theorist. You have to be a fucking practitioner. What's this life about?

That ain't no sense. Being tested, my friend. tests come when you have not studied test come when you think that you're in a great place that's the test the test is every day of your life and most of us fail because we don't know why we're here because we don't go inward to say oh you came to a lot of shit to fix man

and this test sucks but then you start thank you for tuning in Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.